The most destructive books ever written

Toss up. Leo Strauss On Tyranny or Milton Friedman Free To Choose. Well, if you want to substitute other writings by either of these authors I will probably agree with you.

Catchfire: you are so wrong, it is The Edible Woman that is responsible for that.

Anything of Rand's. The power of the cult is very difficult for me to understand. She is such an execrable writer.

Dale Carnegie, How To Win Friends and Influence People (1936), and Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). Both foundational to the plague of self-help delusions all North Americans are now to some degree or other victims of.

Mind you, anything Walt Disney did is worse.

#1 on my list would be the bible.

No one has mentioned Mien Kampf so far.  I wonder how destructive that book actually was (meaning, how instrumental was it to the rise of Adolf Hitler) compared against some dry political treatise that gave rise to the German state, which lead, eventually, to the catastrophe of both world wars? 

And now I'm on this  tack, perhaps an innocuous looking publication by Fritz Haber on Zyclon B pesticide is more destructive than any more widely known book. 

The economic ideas of the physiocrats*, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations?  Edmund Burke's decietfull pratlings on democracy?

On a lighter note,

For Catchfire it  was "Who Has Seen the Wind."  For me, "The Stone Angel". 

* A HA HA HA HA HA HA  (seething breaths...)  After 35 years, I finally worked into conversation the dullest essay topic I was ever assigned in high school: "Discuss the Economic Ideas of  the Physiocrats" 

Ohhhh... good one ETamaran, definitely equal, if not worse than the Bible.

Quote:

That's one of my favourite books.

I read it on my own when I was in Grade Eight, so maybe that's why I liked it - school didn't ruin it for me.

I apologize for my teenager anti-prairie bias. My grade nine english teacher used to show up every Sunday in front of a local hospital, alone, to protest abortions. I wonder if that had anything to do with my dislike of the book. He also was amazed that I knew the words "nought" and "inch."

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W.O. Mitchell's brother was our next-door neighbour, my mom tells me, when I was a wee baby back in Crocus.

My partner used to live beside Irving Layton when he lived in Niagara-on-the-Lake. He used to mow his lawn shirtless, bottle of Jack in hand, and his Order of Canada draped around his neck. That, too, is poetry.

bible

torah

quran

Mein Kampf is indeed one of the most boring books I have ever read.

The Secret one of the most insidious.

The Bible is not a book but a collection of books whose destructiveness varies.

The Liberal Party's "red" books. Notorious for being full of lies and deceit.

Black cats, white cats, they're two wings of the same party in many respects. Very similar. Follow the Bay St money.

Happily (Sadly?), the powerful mythology of mass suicides surrounding Young Werther has little to no evidence to back it up. IIRC, a young woman jumped to her death with a copy of Catcher in the.., er, Young Werther in her pocket (and a poem published at the time blamed Goethe's book), but virtually no instances can be found of young cultish men following suit.

[url=http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/40/055.html]The Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual[/url] and various other instructional manuals like it produced by US shadow governments over the years.

"They say they are teaching democracy. We ask, how can democracy be taught through the barrel of a gun?" - Father Roy Bourgeois

Re: The Communist Manifesto

I'm not sure about the body count claim (what about The Capitalist Manifesto? How many bodies did that book pile up?), but I do know that the first 4000 words or so, the opening chapter, are some of the finest ever written.

Quote:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

I'd have a hard time comparing Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto based on a reading of the texts.

It's probably a good idea if we don't reach for SSC's bait. That goes for the Qur'an non sequitur too.

Catchfire wrote:

It's probably a good idea if we don't reach for SSC's bait. That goes for the Qur'an non sequitur too.

True. Maybe I should delete my last post

Star Spangled Canadian wrote:

Um, Japan was like the very model of imperialism.

Yes, I'd heard that. Imperial powers fight each other. 

Star Spangled Canadian wrote:

And you're going to chalk the Holocaust up to "capitalism"? Really?

Yes, in significant part.

Star Spangled Canadian wrote:

Yeah, slavery was an abomination. Nobody is "ignoring" the fact that capitalism has produced its share of exploitation. But it's not even on par with communism - and communism is a much more recent phenomenon.

I agree. It's not on a par with "communism". It has far surpassed it. As to the "recent" point (although it seems to me irrelevant): there's still capitalism going on, I believe.

Star Spangled Canadian wrote:

Even if you dispute teh 100 million number, you MUST be willing to grant, say, even 50 million. 6 million in Ukraine alone in a few hours from genocidal famine. Not a great record.

I really don't want to open up this can of worms again. But no I don't think it was genocidal. I think Stalin was indifferent to suffering and death and the famine was horrible. But I don't think he set out to eliminate Ukrainians. (That thesis was more of a defense move by people who participated avidly in Nazi genocide.)

No, I don't think so, Rosa. I especially liked: 'there's still capitalism going on, I believe.' Heh. Regardless, SSC is probably alone on this board in thinking CM is destructive, or in any way responsible for the Ukranian famine.

As for bringing this thread back on topic, I really liked skdadl's suggestion (surprise!) of Carnegie's cringe-worthy HTWF&IP and Pearle's TPPT. Certainly they bear some responsibility for the hegemony-affirming The Secret (ick!). Are these really the original ur-texts of self-help delusion?

I might also blame The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1793) for the genesis (or at least its most compelling articulation) of Americal liberal (and Puritan) individualism.

ETA: Here's what Mark Twain had to say about ol' bi-focal Franklin:

Quote:

The subject of this memoir was of a vicious disposition, and early prostituted his talents to the invention of maxims and aphorisms calculated to inflict suffering upon the rising generation of all subsequent ages. His simplest acts, also, were contrived with a view to their being held up for the emulation of boys forever--boys who might otherwise have been happy. It was in this spirit that he became the son of a soap-boiler; and probably for no other reason than that the efforts of all future boys who tried to be anything might be looked upon with suspicion unless they were the sons of soap-boilers. With a malevolence which is without parallel in history, he would work all day and then sit up nights and let on to be studying algebra by the light of a smouldering fire, so that all other boys might have to do that also or else have Benjamin Franklin thrown up to them. Not satisfied with these proceedings, he had a fashion of living wholly on bread and water, and studying astronomy at meal time--a thing which has brought affliction to millions of boys since, whose fathers had read Franklin's pernicious biography.

His maxims were full of animosity toward boys. Nowadays a boy cannot follow out a single natural instinct without tumbling over some of those everlasting aphorisms and hearing from Franklin on the spot. If he buys two cents worth of peanuts, his father says, "Remember what Franklin has said, my son,--`A groat a day's a penny a year;'" and the comfort is all gone out of those peanuts.

[...]

I merely desired to do away with somewhat of the prevalent calamitous idea among heads of families that Franklin acquired his great genius by working for nothing, studying by moonlight, and getting up in the night instead of waiting til morning like a Christian, and that this programme, rigidly inflicted, will make a Franklin of every father's fool. It is time these gentlemen were finding out that these execrable eccentricities of instinct and conduct are only the evidences of genius, not the creators of it. I wish I had been the father of my parents long enough to make them comprehend this truth, and thus prepare them to let their son have an easier time of it. When I was a child I had to boil soap, notwithstanding my father was wealthy, and I had to get up early and study geometry at breakfast, and peddle my own poetry, and do everything just as Franklin did, in the solemn hope that I would be a Franklin some day. And here I am.

Catchfire, you are being naughty.

Och, but Twain was a genius, and too funny to be true. He was also a crank, and Franklin was a crank, and I'm sure the two of them would have got along ... or maybe not ... but it would be wonderful to know enough to do a dialogue des morts between them.

I've never read that essay before, Catchfire, so thank you. What a delight. Lately I've been trying to plod through Franklin's doubts about making the U.S. a republic (specific concern -- not anti-revolution). So I've been tending to think of him as a serious crank, not a bad crank.

skdadl wrote:

Anything of Rand's. The power of the cult is very difficult for me to understand. She is such an execrable writer.

 

 

For some illumination on the power of the Ayn Rand cult, there's a novel by Mary Gaitskill-

"...Two Girls, Fat and Thin follows the childhood and adult lives of Justine Shade (thin) and Dorothy Never (fat). Justine works through her sadomasochistic issues while Dorothy works through her up-and-down commitment to the philosophy of "Definitism" and its founder "Anna Granite" (thinly-veiled satires of Objectivism and Ayn Rand). When journalist Justine interviews Dorothy for an exposé of Definitism, an unusual relationship begins between the two women..."

At least I thought it was illuminating.

Ayn Rand's books are totally devoid of humour! The Floating Head of Ayn Rand - a Timeline (below) is, however, pretty funny.

http://www.saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com/ayn_rand/

for a wonderful send up of Ayn rand see Old School by Toias wOLFF. hE DESCRIBES RAND'S VIST TO A PRIVATE SCHOOL TO EXTOL AN ABSURD SHORT STORY BY A LOSER STUDENT WHICH SHE COMPLETELY MISINTERPRETS.

Ayn Rand.   Is it pronounced Ann or A-in?  Attempted to re-read Atlas Shrugged last year to try to understand what I looked at as a teenager, and could not do it. Would like to describe my feelings to friends, but want pronunciation first, if I'm going to come on all high-minded.  :)

How to pronounce Ayn  (as in Ayn Rand) made you uncomfortable?  :D  Take a shot at it anyway.

You think Rousseau was "evil" , a concept straight out of religious belief, but you're thankful to not be Catholic.  Do you see "evil" as having transcended religion to become a value in the secular world, or do you use it from another religious base of belief?

Dr. Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care.